The present invention relates generally to the field of printing, and more particularly to a system and method of printing while reducing memory requirements. An inkjet printing system may include a printhead and an ink supply which supplies liquid ink to the printhead. The printhead ejects ink drops through a plurality of orifices or nozzles and toward a print media, such as a sheet of paper, so as to print onto the print media. Typically, the nozzles are arranged in one or more arrays such that properly sequenced ejection of ink from the nozzles causes characters or other images to be printed upon the print media as the printhead and the print media are moved relative to each other.
In some printers, such as ink jet printers, data associated with sweeps of a printhead are received into a memory or sweep buffer. For many applications, the amount of data that must be stored for a print sweep can be quite significant. In addition, in order to store all of this data for an entire printer sweep, the memory or sweep buffer is a relatively large RAM thereby contributing significantly to the overall cost of the printer. This is especially true in applications where high quality printing involves large amounts of data in each print sweep. Since memory can still be quite costly, the amount of memory needed for an application can contribute significantly to the overall cost of a printer.
For these and other reasons, a need exists for the present invention.